The Coalblog has been providing balancing information on energy, policy, and the environment since 2004. Terry Headley is the Communications Director of the American Coal Council and Editor of American Coalmagazine.

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BEIJING — Coal prices in China may continue to rise during the upcoming heating season, despite the endeavors of regulators to stabilize them, due to strong demand and overcapacity reduction, experts said.

“From now on to the end of the heating season next spring, coal prices will not show a downturn trend, with demand rising continually, if there are no strong measures from regulators to guarantee supply,” said Zhang Likuan, senior analyst at the China Coal Data Exchange Center.

WASHINGTON, DC — Retail electricity rates for U.S. residential customers averaged 12.8 cents/kWh during the first half of this year, or about 3% more than the same period in 2016, an increase that was driven by higher fuel costs for commodities like natural gas, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The cost of natural gas delivered to U.S. electric generators during the first six months of the year was 37% higher than it was during the same time in 2016, averaging $3.53/MMBtu, EIA said in a note on Monday. While the delivered cost of coal was down about 2% during the same time, residential rates were also influenced by power utilities recovering expenditures on transmission and distribution infrastructure.

WASHINGTON, DC — Ukraine received its first shipment of anthracite coal from the U.S. Wednesday, part of an $80 billion deal between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

This shipment carried 62,000 tons of the total 700,000 tons set to be delivered to Ukraine by the end of the year, the Financial Times reports.

“As agreed with President Trump, first American coal has reached Ukraine. It is a significant contribution to our energy security and a vivid proof of mutually beneficial strategic cooperation between our two nations,” Poroshenko wrote in a Facebook post. “While it continues to steal Ukrainian coal from Ukrainian Donbas, Russia has lost yet another tool for its energy blackmailing.”

New York (September 19, 2017) – The U.S. power grid is on track to lose cost effective power supply diversity, a trend that will raise the cost and variability of power bills and create negative macroeconomic impacts that would ripple out through the broader U.S. economy, a new study by IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO), a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions says.

The People’s Republic of China, the undisputed Pollution King of the world, is ramping up its production of coal-fired power plants — not only in China, but in dozens of other countries as well.

But, strangely, China remains the new darling of the climate-change alarm choir. The communist regime, which is notorious for pumping colossal volumes of deadly toxins into the air, water, and land, is being celebrated as the new global environmental champion.

Houston (Platts)– Coal is projected to provide the majority of US power generation in 2017, retaking the crown from natural gas, according to the US Energy Information Administration’s monthly Short Term Energy Outlook released Tuesday. The agency projects coal will fuel 31.3% of the US’ electricity in 2017 compared with 31.1% for gas.
In 2016, gas surpassed coal as the nation’s primary fuel for the first time, totaling 33.8% of generation compared with 30.4% for coal. The agency has projected gas to be the top fuel in 2017 in most of their reports so far this year, including June’s edition, but increasing gas prices as well as higher hydro generation have pushed gas below coal for the first time.

The War on Coal is well and truly over, but a peculiar debate over its impact lingers on. Revisionist history is central to this debate, with some folks now suggesting that the coal industry was never in a two-front struggle against both a regulatory onslaught and cheap natural gas. Instead, they argue, it was a one-front war against natural gas all along. President Obama may have marshalled his regulatory agencies for battle, but who knew they were firing blanks?

Sheridan County hasn’t experienced active coal mining since the last coal operation ceased in the 1980s, though it was once a booming coal community peppered with company towns.

That may soon change.

Cloud Peak Energy, which operates the Antelope and Cordero Rojo mines in Campbell County, recently applied for a federal permit to enhance roads and a rail spur between the non-operational Youngs Creek north of Ranchester and the bustling Spring Creek mine in Montana. The construction will facilitate the moving of equipment, coal and personnel between the two mines.

WAYNESBURG, Pa. — Two weeks after Derek Cisar’s wife gave birth to their son, the 36-year-old coal miner had to tell her he’d lost his job.

“It wasn’t because there wasn’t any work,” he said, moments after emerging from the underground mine. “Things in the industry in our area had started looking pretty stable for the past few months.

“It all came down to a ruling by a judge … with pressure from two climate-change groups. They effectively upended my life, my family’s life, and the lives of 202 other coal miners who were laid off because of his ruling.”

WASHINGTON, DC (February 3, 2017)– The congressional action this week to strike down the “Stream Protection Rule” issued December 19, 2016 by the Department of the Interior’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement is a welcome step in the right direction for the federal government and for coal. The swift action recognizes the severe flaws in a regulation that would needlessly restrict access to our nation’s abundant coal reserves, increase mining costs, erode federal and state tax revenues, and result in the loss of high numbers of well-paying jobs.